PyCon 2019 | Eita! Why Internationalization and Localization matter

According to the always trustworthy Wikipedia, there are approximately 360 million native English speakers in the world. We, as developers, are so used to write code and documentation in English that we may not realize that this number only represents 4.67% of the world population. It is very useful to have a common language for the communication between developers, but this doesn’t mean that the user shouldn’t feel a little bit more comfortable when using your product.

Translation of terms is only one step in the whole Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) process. It also entails number, date and time formatting, currency conversion, sorting, legal requirements, among other issues. This talk will go through the definition of i18n and l10n as well as show the main tools available for developers to support multiple languages and regional related preferences in their Python program. We will also see how one can enable local support for their website in Django. Finally, this presentation will discuss how we can manage Internationalization and Localization for a bigger product running in different platforms (front and back end) and how to incorporate i18n and l10n into our current development and deploy processes.

Oh, and by the way, “eita!” is a Brazilian interjection to show yourself surprised with something. ?